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Then consider the broad software industry, especially the world of "apps" being developed for iPhone and iPad, and now for Macs. More than 500,000 iOS apps now exist, and 1.2 billion were downloaded in the last week of December 2011. Lots of people are trying to quantify how many jobs this app ecosystem has created. Likely it will mean many tens of thousands of jobs for decades to come, meaning hundreds of thousands of job-years, though even the "app" won't look this way forever or even for long. We'll see.

Apple computers, iPhones, iPads, and multimedia software, like OSX, iOS, Quicktime, and WebKit, drive the Internet and wireless industries. (WebKit is an open software platform developed by Apple that most people have never heard of. But it's crucial to Internet browsers and webpage development.) These devices allow people and companies to create content. They improve productivity and create new kinds of jobs. How many graphic designers would we have had over the years without the Mac?

Apple devices devour bandwidth and storage and drive new generations of broadband and mobile network build-outs, totaling about $65 billion per year in the U.S. So add some significant portion of networking equipment salesmen and telecom pole-climbers and Verizon and Comcast workers and data center technicians. The iPhone alone completely reinvigorated the U.S. mobile industry and ushered in a new paradigm of computing, moving from PC to mobile device. Apple jolted AT&T back to life when the two companies partnered on the first iPhone. How many jobs across the economy did the iPhone "save" by boosting our digital industries when the PC era had about run its course? A lot.

Jobs created a new digital music industry. It's impossible to gauge how many jobs were created versus eliminated. But clearly the new jobs are higher value jobs.

Apple is now the largest buyer of microchips in the world. It buys 23% of all the world's flash memory, for example. Much of that is South Korean. But Apple probably buys something like 20 million Intel microprocessors each year. That's a huge part of Intel's business. Intel employs 100,000 people (not all in the U.S.).

The notion that "almost none" of the "additional 700,000" people who contribute to designing and building Apple products work in the U.S. is false. And silly.

Lots of Apple's foreign suppliers have substantial workforces in the U.S. Oft cited are the two Austin, Texas, Samsung fabs, which employ 3,500 workers who make NAND flash memory and Apple's A5 chip. But many Asian and European Apple suppliers have sales, marketing, and support staff in America.

And of course no government or stimulus jobs are possible without private wealth creation. During the "stimulus" period -- 2009-11 -- Apple paid $16.5 billion in corporate income taxes, thus financing about 2% of the entire $821 billion stimulus package and thus 2% of the stimulus "jobs." One might counter that stimulus was funded with debt, but money is fungible, and issuing debt depends on future claims on wealth. Moreover, because stimulus jobs were so extraordinarily expensive, a different accounting says that Apple's $16.5 billion in taxes could have paid for 330,000 $50,000-a-year salaries.

Pixar

In 1986, Steve Jobs bought a tiny division of George Lucas's LucasFilm and created what we know as Pixar, the leading movie animation studio. In 2006, Pixar merged with Walt Disney. Disney has 156,000 employees and $41 billion in sales, a growing portion of which directly or indirectly relate to Pixar properties, film development, characters, licensing, and distribution. Pixar really saved Hollywood during a dark time for film and spawned a whole new animation boom. Pixar developed and inspired many new technologies for film making, video games, and other interactive visual media.

An additional consideration: Over the 2009-11 period, Disney paid $7 billion in income taxes, thus financing just under 1% of the stimulus and 1% of the "jobs." That $7 billion could have funded 140,000 $50,000-a-year salaries.